I am listening to the Byrds on this morning. Vinyl is much better. It brings an ambiance that digital cannot touch. It is warm and inviting. It makes me feel like there is a blanket over my shoulders. My mother gave me a taste for music. Hers was good when we were younger, both myself and my mom. We would wrap ourselves up in her robe by the record player and listen to Bee Gees and Beatles and Electric Light Orchestra and . . . The green glow of the stereo lights would often be the only thing on in the sun room where we kept our music. I would sort through the albums and pull out just the right one for the two of us. I would pull out a Kiss album and she would give me her mom smirk. I would smile, shrug and put it back and find something more accommodating for our fine line of intersecting tastes. Atlanta Rhythm Section? No. How about the Eagles? Ugh! We could listen to the Bee Gees. Of course she knew I secretly loved the Bee Gees, but my youth of rebellion did not allow for this so she played those fine records while I was walking about the house instead. No body gets too much heaven no more. No body! Id continue to rifle through the stacks until, Ummm, uhh, oh, ahh, I have it! Grease soundtrack?! Yes! We had the Original Broadway version, not the Travolta issue. I once took it to school for record day. We could, in Ms. Phallens second grade class in the old Burlington school, first room on the left up the massive concrete and stone stair way, listen to records we brought from home at the end of school days, when we had done all there was to do. Truthfully, I always knew she wanted to hear what I had to play because she was a lot like my mother. Not in any maternal sense, but in the way she held her lips and perched them when she was upset with our disappointing behaviors. I decided to push the boundaries of taste and etiquette as usual. This thing, this intense need to push back against the tidal wave of normality, has been with me from birth. I played Greased Lightning. Imagine the look on her face when Danny Zuko rants, You know that aint no shit, Ill be gettin lots of tits with Greased Lightning! Ms. Phallen looked at me and said, Ok Chad, we have time for one more, would you like to play another one? I just stood there for a moment, flabbergasted. All my cunning had availed me not one ounce of rebellious victory, not a flinch from her eyes was present. I had just played a record in the second grade, as loud as that little blue spinner would project it, that hollered across the concrete, brick, and plaster walls, echoing like a cannon shot through the 14 foot high ceilings, off the black slate boards, the unthinkable utterance for a 7 year old boy. I had played the word SHIT! Nothing. Not a hint of dissatisfaction. I, without a word, turned to the turntable, a little blue box made of hard and rigid compost of one kind or another with a speaker dutifully placed in the front, coated over with black spray of whatever it was, and placed the needle a little further into the soundtrack, and played Summer Nights. Well played Ms. Phallen, well played. My mother would wrap me up in that ragged pink robe and we would listen to one side then change the record. Sometimes it was as if the world had stopped and I had no brothers and no father. Maybe that wasnt far from the truth regarding my father, but my brothers were ever present in my youth. I worry sometimes that my own son will not get the kind of love and bonding that can only occur among boys in the same household. Through the fist fights and arguments there was no person I would have rather beaten down than my middle brother, and no person I would sooner stand up to defend than him either. There is an irreducible mechanism which transpires between two boys that age, when they live together that simply cannot find a match any other place. We dont talk much anymore, but I always know he is there for me and me for him. Both of my brothers spent time in differing ways with my mother. My eldest took his time in the car, making proud her expectations. She shuttled him to and fro. A constant chauffeur. My middle gardened with her I guess. My mom and I had a stretched and strange relationship, like all of mine. I am a difficult person to love, let alone like. Love might be a much easier relational process to feel with children. They are a belonging to some extent. Stuck with me, she loved me in spite of me I suppose. But to like something, some one rather, that, that is a much different kind of reaction. It is not based on an intuitive or innate sense of urgency. It is a fundamental study of the person with which one seeks to understand. Like is a powerful format for the human institution. To like some one one must find in them something pleasant, fascinating, or, in general, likable. I am not sure I had things that offered that to my mother, or much of anyone for that matter. I was odd. I was transfixed on oddities. Chronically underwhelmed with the basic interests that my class mates, brothers, father, and friends seemed to be culled to enjoy. I could not have cared about things I found ordinary. I was always taken by the far corners of the world, not the middle of the road. That makes for a contemptuous attitude as one ages. Still, here today, in the over cast gray haze of Autumnal divide, where nature sorts herself by an axis shift and we recognize, as men, the turning of the world by her cold indifference to our desires, here in this fleeting moment among the wash of irreversible descent into the unknowable, I think only of the smell of my mothers tattered old robe, wrapped around my little body, squirming to comfort levels not since known, where we would listen to the record player hiss and whirl as the first notes began to play. They filled our lives daily with sounds that became, through the phenomena music, memories themselves. Those moments were never going to cross our paths again. We used vinyl to fill the air in which we gathered. We basked in the glorious rhetoric, the cunning metaphor which popular music values so highly. Each note mounted an attack on the establishment, or beckoned our melancholy to the fore. Whatever the emotional response, they are irretrievable now. Whisked away like so many maple leaves in winters plight of wind and wet, those times are reduced to listening to the Byrds in my kitchen, hoping for a minute more of the magic which has transported me back to that place when I was a child, under my mothers wings.
Posted on: Tue, 11 Nov 2014 17:09:57 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015